


Marginalia

by cosbysweaters



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Early Work, M/M, Pre-Slash, arthur is an art student, eames is a truck driver, they are both huge nerds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-02
Updated: 2011-03-02
Packaged: 2019-04-04 09:23:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14017188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosbysweaters/pseuds/cosbysweaters
Summary: Arthur is hitchhiking to anywhere and trucker!Eames is happy for the company.





	Marginalia

**Author's Note:**

> A pretentious little fic I wrote back in 2011 for the arthur_eames Secret Santa fic exchange on livejournal. Posting here for posterity's sake - and to encourage myself to write fanfic again so that this isn't my only work on this site ^_^.

He’s crazy. That’s the only way to account for this foray into bohemian nomadism in the dead fucking middle of winter.   
  
Days ago, the warmth of a few shared bottles of wine seeping through his body, this genuinely had seemed like The Thing To Do - the precise reasoning process behind that decision remains a little hazy, but the desire to let impulse lead to action had been strong.   
  
The thing with art school is – he’s not sure it’s for him. He can’t stand most of his cohort, and doesn’t particularly fit with the art-school groupings: too preppy for the alternative contingent, and too genuinely invested in the prototypical hipster trappings to be friends with actual hipsters who can only feign a superficial interest in the poetic works of Baudelaire, and are, for art students, ironically unaware of the philosophical and social implications of art beyond their own immediate concerns.   
  
The thing with Arthur and art school is - he doesn’t have the patience to weed through the stoners, hipsters, fashion students  _et. al._  to find the least ridiculous members of his cohort. Which, no,  _isn’t_  fair, but he has no illusions or pretensions that he is occupying the higher moral ground here; he knows he’s a bastard, knows that his east coast prep school has thoroughly failed to prepare him for this industry and he  _knows_  he allows it to operate as a barrier between him and everyone he’s ever been told he’s better than.   
  
The thing with Arthur and art school and this wintertime venture into transience is – he needs to be here, hitchhiking along Route 20, with his camera and the warm tones of his studio need to be at a continually receding distance.  
  
**  
  
He hates people.  
  
The internet had lead him to believe the US 20 provided the shortest time between rides on a trip out of New York. He’s got two sore feet that say  _fuck you, google_  to counter that notion. He repositions the straps of his backpack for the 50th time, and questions his sanity for the 74th. (Still digging into his bony shoulders, and still probably certifiable.)  
  
Another headlighted blur displaces the air, muffled, vaguely familiar music increasing in volume only to fade as the car moves beyond his hearing. The wake of the vehicle isn’t still, an almost-steady stream of vehicles entering the interstate – and it’s beautiful, actually.   
  
Hands moving before the thought is fully formed, his eye is pressed against his camera’s viewfinder, the weight of it familiar, even as his gloved fingers perform their tasks clumsily. He attempts to capture the submilimity in standing by a busy interstate onramp for the first time in your life, banking on the kindness (and not-homicidalness) of strangers.  
  
He’s turning slightly, re-framing the scene, when he notices  _him_.   
  
There’s a guy at the bottom of the ramp staring up at him, the bright end of a cigarette casting a dull glow over his features. Importantly, he is standing by a truck. Arthur raises a hand, gesticulates haphazardly, and darts down the ramp at the first opportunity.   
  
Arthur’s a photographer: he notices details. Sometimes he wishes he didn’t. Like right now – having miraculously surviving his dash down the ramp - the man’s silhouette gives way to detail as Arthur draws near. He’s wearing a frankly hideous combination of colours – and surely it requires a certain amount of effort to even  _acquire_  a thermal undershirt that combines baby-poo-brown with murky-water-blue – that Arthur is positive has seared itself painfully to some sartorially masochistic part of his brain.   
  
A different part of his anatomy, a bit south of his brain, takes in a few other features. He’s broad and muscled, carries himself easily, with a solid confidence that make him seem taller than he is, and intriguing dark edges of probable-tattoos peek from (and clash with) his shirt.   
  
The man quirks a grin, flicks his cigarette to the side and – “I’m Eames, and you look like you need a ride, love.” He’s British.  
  
**  
  
The cab is hot. Arthur immediately shrugs out of about three layers of clothing, noting that Eames does little more than shuck up his sleeves.   
  
The truck thrums beneath them; it’s not uncomfortable, but it’s different to a car: the weight of it a looming presence to his back. The dashboard is littered with haphazardly affixed trinkets, postcards, a grainy photograph and a prominently featured crucifix – all eerily illuminated in a dull shade of green from the instrument panel. It’s quietly transfixing, the slight tremors of the engine causing a not-quite imperceptible blurring at the edges.  
  
Arthur’s fingers twist towards his camera – he stops himself – uses words instead, “Thanks again. If I never hear the Doppler shift of a car engine, I think I’ll be happy.”  
  
That earns him a huff of laughter. “First time, then? You’d best get used to it.”  
  
“I suppose I shall,” and Arthur’s smiling. Maybe he’s still a little high from that moment above the ramp, but his chest moves with a deep trill of excitement. New York is at an ever increasing distance behind him, and the black and white blur of the road stretches out before the bright lights of the truck in a way never experienced in Arthur’s own little car.  
  
**  
  
Arthur is fond of plans. For instance, in the third grade, right in the midst of his model airplane obsession, he’d filled several notebooks in a crude cursive with the dimensions of 157 types of aircraft, noting the types and quantities of required materials and the optimal order of construction (factoring in the available storage space, cost, ease of acquisition of the necessary materials, and his parents' ongoing willingness to cater to this particular interest). Right? Plans: he likes them.  
  
So it isn’t at all out of character that yesterday he’d listed probable lines of enquiry and potential topics of conversations that might arise during the course of a ride. There may have been diagrams.   
  
Which is why he’s momentarily startled when, of all things, Eames says, “So, before I pulled over for a fag,” –  _British_ , Arthur reminds himself – “I was thinking about untranslatable words.”  
  
Men with accents like that should not be allowed to discuss language. Or use the word fag so casually.  
  
“What about them?” Arthur asks.  
  
“’Mamihlapinatapei’ refers to the silent look shared between two people who both desire to initiate something but are both reluctant to start.”  
  
And, ok, but: “There are a lot of words that are difficult to translate into a comparable, single word. But you’ve just demonstrated that this doesn’t mean they’re untranslatable.”  
  
The man carries on as though Arthur hadn’t just offered up a perfectly good observation. “’Wabi’ – a flawed detail that creates an elegant whole. There’s also, ‘fairness’ which mea - ”  
  
Arthur cuts him off, bristling: he knows what fairness means, and besides, “Languages have different syntaxes. Putting aside the fact that linguists can’t even agree on a technical definition of the word ‘ _word_ ,’” – they can’t, Arthur had been oddly horrified to discover – “the fact that one language has a  _single word_  for a concept that every other language requires a sentence for doesn’t mean anything.”   
  
There’s a moment of silence. “There’s also ‘fairness’,” Eames begins again, “which is thought to be one-to-one untranslatable.” He looks over at Arthur as though expecting him to interrupt. When Arthur doesn’t, he goes on. “The closest word German has is ‘gerecht,’ but that also means ‘just’ and ‘equitable’ – a three-to-one translation.”  
  
‘Just’ and ‘equitable’ rove in Arthur’s mind, differentiating themselves from each other, attaching to contexts, but, he thinks, they’re both synonymous with ‘fair.’ He doesn’t say this yet.   
  
“The French have ‘juste’ and ‘équitable,’ which can be translated as ‘fair’, but can also be translated as ‘just’ and ‘equitable’ – it’s not that other languages lack a sense of fairness,” and Arthur has read enough about the ultimatum game to know that ‘fairness’ as a concept is a pretty universal notion, “but English is the only language to have a word for it.”  
  
All Arthur says is, “I think we’re operating with different definitions of ‘translation’.”   
  
And he’s pretty sure that’s significant.   
  
**  
  
Eames is driving through the night, and the least Arthur can do is keep him company.   
  
Eames has asked his opinion on David Lynch films – and really, what  _had_  Mulholland Drive been about - typography, Meredith Frampton and whether or not he thinks enigmatology is a legitimate field of enquiry.   
  
Some of the things Eames say make it clear that he has more than a passing familiarity with the topics, though his overall manner of engagement over the course of the night has been an operation in misdirection, belying what Arthur suspects is a deep fount of knowledge.  
  
He hasn’t asked why Arthur’s hitchhiking without a destination, where he’s from, what he meant by photographing Eames’ profile as his eyes had crinkled at the corners when Arthur had wanted him to define ‘legitimate,’ nor what he’s doing with his camera at all.  
  
Arthur reaches down to grasp one of the (surprising number of) books littering the cab floor.   
  
“Billy Collins? Seriously?”   
  
The man’s mouth quirks into a crooked grin, incongruous and stark against his fucking  _tribal_  tattoo, “Not what you expected, love?”  
  
He resists the urge to snap that Collins is the plebeians’ poet laureate (because, yeah:  _bastard_ ) and settles for rolling his eyes. “I hope you’ve got more poetry in here, or I’m going to be forced to make assumptions about the quality of British education.”  
  
“When I was a child, my vision was refined in certain skies; my face is the product of every nuance.”  
  
Arthur’s a little impressed, but: “ _Enfant, certains ciels ont affiné mon optique : tous les caractères nuancèrent ma physionomie._ ” It’s one of Rimbaud’s lesser-known poems, but he’d stumbled upon Rimbaud at fourteen whilst trying to impress his French tutor. The tutor turned out to have an appreciation for neither poetry nor teenage crushes, still, Arthur had found something he could love: discovered Verlaine, Baudelaire, and later Mallarmé and Fondane.   
  
He tells Eames. Not about his tutor; about poetry and the sound of languages, and realising art is important, and he rambles a little here – digressing into another favourite topic: the evolutionary connection between art and human sociability.   
  
Something in Eames’ eyes light up at the new topics, and he doesn’t ask Arthur to clarify when he says, “Art is social” with no explanation, just conveys enthusiasm as he says, “Exactly! It’s learnt – children raised in isolation – by wolves, or asshole parents,” he gestures one-handedly: the nature of the isolation is unimportant, “never learn to create art.”   
  
And that’s interesting, because it begs so many questions: where does that creative impulse come from? Why does art, like language, have to be introduced at a young age? How and why did humans first begin to touch paint to cave walls in so many disparate regions of the world?  
  
Arthur’s in some kind of intellectual, art-nerd heaven.   
  
Eventually, somehow – possibly because if you discuss art long enough you wind up at existentialism - they’re talking about epistemology.   
  
“I don’t have the answers. I doubt the answers exist. I doubt  _truth_  exists, and if it does, I doubt it can be subjectively captured through art. All we can do is try to represent truth as it appears to us subjectively.”   
  
Eames says nothing for a few minutes. Then, “you ever read Steinbeck?”  
  
Arthur shakes his head.   
  
“In one of his novels - Tortilla Flat – he depicted the lives of a group of pasianos. He tried to show that they were good, honest people – unemployed but largely content. But the reading public viewed them as lazy vagrants. Critics argued that he drew on a single stereotype of ‘the Mexican,’ to the detriment of the novel’s depth.”  
  
Eames’ radio chooses that moment to crackle into life, distorted CB mixing with a more generic trucker vernacular. It’s mostly nonsensical to Arthur, but Eames stiffens just slightly, shoots Arthur an apologetic look and increases the volume.   
  
Arthur tunes out the ensuing conversation, mind drifting around thoughts of culture, identity and perception. They’re so intimately bound, a nexus of the individual’s relationship to the rest of the world, that, at this late hour, he can’t quite tease out the exact dynamics of what it might mean to be an artist, befriending a group of people, thinking that (a) you understand their culture and (b) understand it enough to show the rest of the world.   
  
A touch to his shoulder causes him to start and turn to Eames.   
  
“Hmm, sorry?”  
  
“I said: people will bring their own prejudices to bear on everything they encounter – I think ‘the truth’ is an idea, but I don’t think it exists. There are only points of view.”  
  
Several things rearrange themselves in Arthur’s head and thinking, talking on the fly: “It’s like translation.”  
  
It’s like translation. Cultural baggage, integral to the way the individual orients themself within the world, it’s something we bring to our understanding of any situation.  
  
English doesn’t have a word for ‘a look exchanged between two people when both desire something that neither wish to initiate’ and maybe that does mean something. Not that literal meaning can’t be conveyed, but maybe that the essence of a culture that needed a word to describe a particular kind of silent eye contact is beyond easy grasp to a culture that didn’t.  
  
“Steinbeck’s public” Arthur says, “ presumably they understood his words, his narrative – but they couldn’t divorce the characters’ reality from their own cultural context.”   
  
**  
  
Arthur must doze, because he opens his eyes and it’s morning. The truck is stationary, and the driver’s seat is empty. He’s confused and about to get out of the cabin when he hears movement behind him and Eames head pops out from behind the curtain partition, separating the sleeping area from the front of the cab.  
  
“Breakfast?”  
  
Arthur continues to wake in increments on the chilly walk over to the diner, and is about fully coherent by the time he’s consumed two cups of something passing as coffee.   
  
Dawn is unkind to the diner, it’s utilitarian décor cast in lonely shadows and pink hues. The way the waitress looks, morning shadow billowing out behind her as she stares out the window, and the way a larger frame sets this against the backdrop of a near empty room - Arthur thinks he’ll always see the world in shadows, searching for a language in the way they offer contradictory, intuitive experiences of clarity and obfuscation.   
  
He’s taken both photos, when Eames says, “I drive because I like the pace,” but asks,  _what do you find in photography_.  
  
“I’m not good with words.” Arthur looks away, back towards the window now bereft of a waitress to give it human appeal. “I’m not. But there are stories I want to explore.”  
  
FIN

**Author's Note:**

> Title of fic comes from Billy Collins’ poem of the same name.  
> Eames quotes Paul Schmidt's translation of Arthur Rimbaud's War.  
> Arthur quotes the original French because he's Arthur.  
> Eames paraphrases:  
> Ginsberg while discussing ‘truth’: “I don’t think there is any truth. There are only points of view.”  
> Bart Wilson’s article in The Atlantic, while discussing the translatability of ‘fair’.


End file.
